suspension of disbelief applies here: can you believe a boy being raised by a pack of wolves? best buddies with a black leopard and a bear? able to speak and be spoken to by all animals? I wonder how influenced edgar rice burroughs was, by this book..you remember him: he wrote tarzan of the apes, which was dumbed down, who was dumbed down by, Hollywood. of course that was situationally Africa, and mowgli has his adventures in India. the book is a collection of short stories that cohere quit well. the best here is rikki-tikke-tavi, who is a mongoose. rikki has a to the death fight with a huge cobra. mowgli is not involved in this story. it adds depth to the whole saga. that's the quality of kipling: he brings depth as well as breadth. I have not been able to read KIM, though critics say it is his best, along with a few of the short stories. I recommend reading The Man Who Would Be King, next. The movie, starring Michael Caine, and Sean Connery, is also excellent.

I spent about three minutes flipping through this new edition of an old book, and was taken aback at how amazing the illustrations are! There are several fold-out and action pages (akin to pop-up books). I've never read this book, but now I plan to.

Okay, so I'm majorly biased, but my favorite character is the jackal. The jackal Tabaqui, to be precise. Can you tell? Anyway, I liked this book better than the Disney movie, mainly because of the poetry in between the stories. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was one of my favorites that wasn't related to Mowgli's story. Really interesting.

Fun to read this after always wanting to!
SO different from the Disney movie (obviously) but it had been a long time since I had thought about Disney's weirdly motivated "adaptations" of classic stories. BUT I love Disney's Jungle Book, Bill Peet, one of my top three favorite children's book author/illustrators worked heavily on the Disney version, and his style is obvious in Mowgli's gangly body, and how Bagheera and Baloo move. The strangest thing reading Kipling's version, was that Kaa, the massive rock python, is Mowgli's friend/ally in the book, and possibly the animal who comes closest to him as an equal.
I was having all sorts of Kaa dreams after reading this, check out this passage after Kaa sheds his skin "for perhaps the two hundredth time since his birth" - "That afternoon Mowgli was sitting in the circle of Kaa's great coils, fingering the flaked and broken old skin that lay all looped and twisted among the rocks just as Kaa had left it. Kaa had very courteously packed himself under Mowgli's broad, bare shoulders, so that the boy was really resting in a living armchair." Did I mention that Mowgli is a hotty 17 year old for about half of Kipling's jungle book?
I could write a whole paper on this book, Kipling's morals and motivations, making human Mowgli the most superior and powerful being in the jungle and also a stellar example of ideal masculinity/imperialism because of his being raised in the Jungle. I'd also like to write a paper about Kaa's weird sensuality, all of the animals in the jungle are a little in love/lust with Mowgli.
Good read except for all the snake dreams.